erful impediments, the training
may permit of some alleviations. These consist in exercises which affect
the physical body; yet everything in this domain that has not been
directly imparted by the teacher, or those having knowledge and experience
of these things, is fraught with danger. Such exercises, for instance,
include a certain regulated process of breathing to be carried out for a
very short space of time. These regulations of the breathing correspond in
quite a definite way to particular laws of the psycho-spiritual world.
Breathing is a physical process, and when this act is so carried out as to
be the expression of a psycho-spiritual law, physical existence receives
the direct stamp, as it were, of spirituality, and the physical matter is
transformed.

For this reason occult science is able to call the change due to such
direct spiritual influence, a transmutation of the physical body, and this
process represents what is called "working with the philosopher's stone"
by him who has a knowledge of these matters. He who knows these things,
frees himself indeed from those concepts which have been limited by
superstition, humbug and charlatanry. The significance of the phenomena
does not become less to him who knows, just because, as a spiritual
investigator, all superstition is foreign to him. When he has acquired a
concept of a significant fact, he may be allowed to call it by its
_correct name_ although that name has been fixed upon it as a result of
misunderstanding, error and nonsense.

Every true intuition is in fact a "working with the philosopher's stone,"
because each genuine intuition calls directly upon those powers which act
from out the supersensible world, into the world of the senses.

-------------------------------------

As the occult student climbs the path leading to cognition of the higher
worlds, he becomes aware at a particular point that the cohesion of the
powers of his own personality is assuming a different form from that which
it possesses in the world of the physical senses. In the latter the ego
brings about a uniform co-operation of the powers of the soul--primarily of
thought, feeling and will. These three soul powers are actually, under
normal conditions of human life, in perpetual relation one with another.
For instance, we see a particular object in the external world, and it is
pleasing or is displeasing to the soul; that is to say, the perception of
the thin